Jailed Pussy Riot leader: ‘I love Russia but I hate Putin’

BERLIN — One of the three members of punk band Pussy Riot jailed last month for a protest in a Russian cathedral launched a fierce new attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin in a magazine interview.

“I love Russia but I hate Putin,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova told the German news weekly Der Spiegel, in a handwritten answer to questions the magazine submitted to her via her lawyer from her jail cell.

Tolokonnikova, considered the leader of the group, also told the weekly she wanted to see a revolution in Russia.

“The Putin system… does not belong in the 21st century,” she wrote.

“It is much more reminiscent of primitive societies or the dictatorial regimes of the past,” she added.

A Moscow court jailed Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich for two years last month for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”.

They had burst into Russia’s main cathedral wearing their trademark balaclavas and shouted out a few lines of their protest song on February 21, in which they call on the Holy Virgin to drive Putin from power.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, 22 and 24 respectively, are both mothers of young children. Fellow band member Samutsevich is 30 years old.